Vancouver, British Columbia
May 15-17, 1996
MS. PATRICK (University of British Columbia): Thank you, Dr. Strangway. Are there questions, comments, or observations regarding Dr. Strangway's address?
MR. KOBULNICKY (University of Connecticut): Could you reflect just for a minute on your 11- or 12-year history to speak about the changes during that period and tell me if you think that there is still some way of looking back at what has taken place in that self-organizing system, while also being able to look at its meaning when looking forward?
DR. STRANGWAY: Well, that's a very tough question, because what you, who are not from British Columbia or maybe even Canada, may not be fully aware of are the enormous budget cuts that are taking place in some of our provinces today, particularly in Alberta and Ontario. In 1983/84, just before I arrived, there was a 25 percent cut in appropriations to the universities over a period of about a year and a half. That's a slightly exaggerated number because it's relative to inflation, and inflation was pretty high in those days.
Many of these things are imposed upon us and I, having come at the end of that time, have had a very interesting opportunity in this province to be in the aftermath of what the rest of our Canadian universities are now going through. Canadian universities in the other provinces, I expect, have more to come because they haven't yet come close to having what happened in this province when the revenues dropped deeply. This province is very dependent upon lumber, pulp and paper, and mineral products; when the price of these resources fall and companies lose money, there is no tax revenue.
We have been very fortunate in the subsequent years and we have been aggressive with respect to campaign activities. Campaign activities, of course, are not really substitutes for budget cuts, because people don't like to give you money for what they pay to the tax office, but they have helped to keep a spirit of entrepreneurship and dynamism alive at the university.
In terms of other kinds of changes, we have also moved substantially as an institution. A lot of the focus has been on the physical side of things, but this isn't really where the big changes have been made. That's just the visible part. The substantial changes that have been made are among faculty members, students, and individuals: an increasing awareness that we have to be accountable to the public, and that first-rate research has to be competed for and won. So there have been dramatic shifts in the way people respond to this wider environment.
I'd like to think that these changes are here to stay, but I always come back to the point that I think of myself, vice-presidents, and even deans as being facilitators to allow people to do whatever it is they do and to do it very well. Which means I do believe in a kind of a chaos concept, because we don't, in fact, direct or instruct, and our missions really have to consider what individuals do. It's the collective that allows you to see the order, which is why I like the model so much.
There is a kind of a seamlessness that is beginning to appear in institutions, and I suspect that is taking place everywhere. People from electrical engineering are now talking to people from law about patent issues. People from all of these different areas are beginning to have a dialogue with each other and realize that, in some sense, we're all in this together.
MS. BREIVIK (Wayne State University): From the changes you have seen, do you notice any new trends in student learning towards preparing them to function better in such a chaotic world? If so, what role do you see for the libraries in such learning?
DR. STRANGWAY: We have not focused, certainly at our university, and it is probably true for others, nearly enough on the teaching and learning process. But, you hear people talking much more about learning than about teaching, which is probably good, because learning can be very diverse.
With the new technologies, there are immensely interesting ways of having people learn things more effectively. I keep coming back to it as improvement and enrichment in the learning process. Libraries have a very central role to play in the network dimensions and in the shared network of all of this kind of activity.
I don't see the technologies in our sector as being major drivers in the academic side of the institutions as productivity generators. I use those words because you have to use them for the bureaucrats, but I don't like using it in reference to academia because what the individuals do is what we're all about.
I hear lots of talk now about the outreach that goes into small communities, upgrading courses and things of that sort, a lot of which is being done through technology. So there are many things we can do that way, both in enriching our own learning processes as well as in reaching out to the wider communities. But this doesn't mean that you can decrease the number of faculty members and double your student numbers, because, by doing so, you lose the essence of what a university is all about: what its faculty members do.
MR. DeGENNARO (Harvard University): Dr. Strangway, you have described tremendous changes that have taken place and new industries that have grown. Much of that was funded by the government. At the same time, you also describe the tremendous cutbacks that are being made both in the United States and Canada. Apparently your message isn't getting through to the government authorities. Would you comment on that phenomenon?
DR. STRANGWAY: In some ways it has not been getting through nearly as well as it should. But then again, in this province as we begin to move away from a resource-based economy to a knowledge-based economy, as it's described, I think there is an awareness and understanding that this is an essential element of the future of this place.
The problem in Canada is, as I guess it is in your country, that the country has enormous deficits, it has a debt that has accumulated to an enormously high level, and although that is largely at the federal level, all of the provinces also have a certain amount of debt, and there is some sympathy with the people who are trying to get the deficits and debts under control. We try to point out that we are the seed corn for the future and that we are probably the way out of debt in the long run, but if they take us too far down the path of debt not only will we not be able to recover, the province, or the country, will never get back, either.
My sense is that there is some understanding of that issue, but there are great dollar issues to be dealt with. They're very serious in Canada, and I'm sure they are in the U.S., as well. You have to have some sympathy, but I worry immensely that it's the very people we are educating and the very research we are doing that is the way out of this problem, and so we need to keep that message alive. But it doesn't mean they will hear us all of the time, or that, if they do hear us, they will do what we want them to do.
MS. BAKER (Washington University-St. Louis): Dr. Strangway, you talked about how universities are creating and driving the change that we deal with. The examples you gave were from the sciences. Can you comment on the role, or perhaps lack thereof, of the social sciences and humanities in creating the change with which we are living?
DR. STRANGWAY: I think it's harder to give concrete examples for the social sciences and humanities, but I do believe that the way of thinking things through, the way of analyzing them and so on, is absolutely central. Given the great communications revolution we are in, pretty soon technology will not be the issue. The question will be what we will do with technology, what values we will attach to it, and so on.
In some ways, in the long run the social sciences and humanities will have a much greater impact on us than the sciences will. The sciences have developed these means to an end, but it won't be very long before we change our focus to what it is we want to do with all this wonderful technology. Perhaps we are already there. We haven't really asked those questions yet in society. The changes have been moving so quickly that we haven't really gotten back to the kind of policy questions and values that underlie them; in the next few years that will become more important as we think about why we are doing it all, or what advantage it is to us.
MS. VON WAHLDE (State University of New York-Buffalo): The institutional direction you mentioned whereby more faculty are becoming interrelated in their work is a direction I hear my own administration talking about. How have you seen this approach work at your own institution?
DR. STRANGWAY: Much of the reason we were able to do some of those things is because we had a very aggressive fundraising activity. This effort was largely oriented to things that, in terms of endowments, had the capacity to cross various boundaries. In fact, there were many complaints from individual deans saying, "You didn't raise enough money for me and my faculty." And the answer was, "No, I raised a lot of money for the school of graduate studies because that is the one that crosses all the different disciplines and you have a chance, as a faculty member, to participate in that process."
Ruth also mentioned the capital fund we developed from the real estate corporation. We actually have taken all of that money and, instead of just putting it into the endowment, we have used it to create challenge grants for the faculties to do joint projects, and they are expected to double the funds. If a faculty has approval from us to go and seek funds for, say, a $2 million endowment, we will match that with a $1 million endowment, provided it fits the criteria, and that, of course, will help immensely in the fundraising activities.
MR. NEAL (Johns Hopkins University): One of the things we're trying to develop in the library community is a common concern about the future of scholarly communication. As a person who has contributed a great deal to the scholarly journal literature, has consumed a lot of it, and who is subsidizing it at the high level of university president, could you reflect a bit about how you look at the future of scholarly communication and, in particular, the future role and nature of the scholarly journal?
DR. STRANGWAY: That's a very difficult question. Even when I was publishing some years ago, my personal observation was that, in my field, by the time I read a paper in a journal, I had already heard it or had seen a first draft or a copy from my colleagues. If I was really right there with the particular things I was doing, I already knew what was being published.
Now, the question is, How do you move from the kudos you get from having it published to having more informal publishing? I think informal publishing has been in place a long time. It is obviously a lot faster now with faxes and other telecommunication technologies. I suspect that we will have to, over time, move away from the formality of the scholarly journals, at least in the kinds of fields I'm describing. But I don't know how one institution can make that decision on a unilateral basis.
It will have to somehow be a collective that says, "The journals aren't really very useful to me any more." The journals, to me, weren't really very useful, to be candid. The journals I did find to be the most useful were ones that had big review papers, because you would read a 40- or 50-page review that would help you catch up, and that's the kind of thing that would be great for instructional purposes, as well. As scientists, we always paid page charges, $1,000 a page or so, to publish our work when everybody who was ever going to read it had already read it before you put your money on the table.
I suspect that this process will somehow work its way through the system, but I think it will be very difficult. I don't know how it will change, but it clearly is going to change, and, in fact, is already.
MS. TAYLOR (Brown University): As you've observed developments in your own institution over the last decade and as you look into the future, do you see the evolution of new and improved ways for doing strategic planning that involves the entire institution?
DR. STRANGWAY: If I had the answer to that question, we'd be doing it. To pass the buck a little, in ten or 11 years now as president, I've been through six or seven premiers of the province. I've been through the same number of ministers and deputy ministers. And everyone, when they have come in, has started a five- or ten-year planning exercise. So I have a shelf full of provincial planning exercises, none of which ever actually had any impact at all, other than to make us do a lot of work and think about these things.
I don't want to be overly cynical about detailed academic strategic planning, but I have some sense that, no matter what you do, the scenario will change. I've even heard some of the gurus say that the era of strategic planning is over, that it's now the era of scenario planning, where you paint various scenarios and ask, "If it got this bad, what would we do?" and, "If it went this well, what would we do?"
I'm a little bit of that school, but not entirely, because we are working really hard, particularly on the support service side and all its various ramifications, to get a picture of what the actual costs are so we can truly understand where the subsidies are shifting within the institution. But I have a tendency to try to protect the academic core from getting into detailed academic planning because I'm not sure you can do a lot about that.
We have taken cuts, it's not that we haven't, but it's been a little here and a little there and over a period of time. These great massive planning exercises are really tough and I'm not sure they deliver results.
MS. BAKER (Washington State University): One of the major changes in my own institution, and I think it is true for many of my colleagues, has been in the area of distance education, where, instead of assuming that everyone will come to us, we are going to them--certainly for us, technology has made this possible. Could you please comment if that has been a major trend?
DR. STRANGWAY: It's a big pattern across Canada. It's true in this province for the interesting reason that we have too few people in too many small places, and we need distance education for feeding information into lots of small communities. I know that, in many parts of the world, it is happening for the opposite reason, but the solution may be the same.
Interestingly, this province years ago formed the Open Learning Agency (also called the Open Learning Institute, the Knowledge Network, and various other combinations) basically to try to open that up. Delivering distance education courses throughout the province via this Open Learning Agency has had a remarkably interesting effect. It has had a very important social effect because we've reached into homes, to places where people are time-bound or place-bound. They take one or two of these courses, and they get fired up about it. The incredible enrollment pressures that we have now at UBC are largely driven by distance education; at our institution we take in one out of every six applicants. The original idea was that this would be a cost-effective, inexpensive way of delivering information, but, in fact, it has had exactly the opposite effect. It will cost the province an immense amount of money to respond to this pressure, to the demand they created. But I maintain that this is a social good.
So, I believe it's good that distance education is interactive, but it didn't have the consequences that everybody expected, to get a lot of content out there without it costing much. It put a political pressure back because people said, "We really want our kids to get hands-on experience now."
MR. EADIE (University of Calgary): I'd like to bring you back, if I could, to the matter of money--not that you've gone all that far from it--because I, too, have been struck by the growth of universities since the end of World War II and, at least in Canada, the major role in which changed patterns of public funding fed that growth. My question is whether we are entering a new fiscal ecology and, if so, where do you see us as grazing?
DR. STRANGWAY: I expect we are entering a new fiscal ecology, driven largely by the deficit problems and debts. And there are real differences across the country because there are certain places in which the demand, as I think is true in parts of the U.S., is going down. In this province the population continues to grow and the 18- to 24-year-old population is going to grow substantially now and for the foreseeable future. So we're in a fairly different situation.
In British Columbia, we have traditionally had a very low participation rate, but what we're seeing is that the participation rate is growing, and there is a growing population, and that's what's putting the pressure on us. But that's not true in different provinces. In Ontario, for example, the demand is going down and people are scrambling to fill places.
As the federal and provincial governments begin to withdraw, we'll see tuition levels rise to something more comparable to what we see in the U.S. public institutions. We still have very low tuitions. I think there's a feeling in the country, and certainly in British Columbia, that if tuition were to double from its current $2,300, it would be well received as long as it was done reasonably slowly. I think we will see more things like what Queens is doing in the professional areas: we'll see high tuition rates where there's a quick payback. We will probably see medicine and dentistry moving in that direction.
In a way, the good news for us is that there is considerable room and public tolerance for a significant increase in tuition over the next few years.
MS. PATRICK: This brings the question and answer period to an end. Thank you, Dr. Strangway.